The Return of Trump—I

Ben Tarnoff • Zephyr Teachout • Bill McKibben • Michael Hofmann • Linda Greenhouse • Garry Wills

Ben Tarnoff

Donald Trump has spent nearly a decade discombobulating people who are paid to think about politics. His appeal has been consistently underestimated. It has also been, just as consistently, overcomplicated. The substance of his style is simple: a gleeful hostility toward the institutions that have traditionally organized American life. He positions himself not merely as an outsider but as a destroyer: someone who delights in the demolition of norms and normalcy. “This is not normal” was a protest slogan from his first term; for Trump and his admirers, that’s exactly the point.

His disorderliness is part of what makes him so entertaining. He is the consummate heel, a performer who owes much to the beloved antiheroes of professional wrestling. But beneath the buffoonery is something deathly serious. Large numbers of Americans have come to believe that their body politic is severely diseased. In Trump, they have found a man ruthless enough to inflict the remedy.

Democrats have long understood this aspect of Trumpism. Their response has been to rally to the defense of institutions. The modern Democratic Party is, above all, the guardian of norms and normalcy. This does not mean it is entirely incapable of creativity: the Biden administration’s domestic progressivism easily exceeded that of any presidency since Lyndon Johnson’s. But this agenda was embedded within a restorationist project. The aspiration of Bidenomics was to legitimize American governance. Some things would be changed for others to remain the same.

There are material factors at work here. The Democratic base is increasingly populated by affluent professionals, and they tend to be institutionalists. For them, the basic pillars of their country’s political economy are worth protecting. Yet the coalition also includes many working-class voters who are less sanguine about the status quo, and whose allegiance must be secured through progressive reforms. Thus the political complexion of the party at present: meliorist, even at times ambitiously so, but never antisystemic.

The inconvenience is that we live in antisystemic times. Trump intuited this, and now he has used it to install himself in the White House twice. Each election is different, of course, and exit polls show that anger over inflation was the single biggest factor in Trump’s recent victory. What animated this anger was not just the struggle to afford groceries and other necessities, however, but the spectacle of Democratic politicians and affiliated experts telling people that, contrary to the evidence of their own experience, the economy was in excellent health.

This is precisely the sort of dissonance that breeds the legitimacy crisis on which Trumpism thrives. Gaza may have been a less decisive campaign issue, but it offers a more extreme example of the same dynamic. The Biden Administration is fond of talking about something called the “rules-based international order,” even as it provisions Israel with whatever it needs to genocidally slaughter the Palestinian people. One of Trump’s favorite themes is the mendacity and moral depravity of the ruling class. In the killing fields of Gaza, one could hardly find clearer proof.

Trump will not improve the lives of Palestinians, nor those of most Americans. Neither will he wholly transfigure the structures of government. He is, in practice, selective in his anti-institutionalism: he may devote his next term to dismantling the administrative state, but antidemocratic institutions like the Electoral College, the Senate, and the Supreme Court serve him and his allies quite well.

For those who oppose him, the task of the next four years—and indeed the next several decades—is to think not in terms of restoration but of transformation. Trumpism cannot be defeated through moral appeals, a return to normal, or any combination of policies and messaging. It is a civilizational phenomenon, one that draws its energy from an atmosphere of civilizational emergency, in much the same way that classical fascism, its closest historical analogue, did in the previous century. An empire in decline is a dangerous animal.

To meet the exigencies of the era requires envisioning and enacting a different kind of country, with a different kind of relationship to the rest of the world. There are precedents to consult—Reconstruction, the Popular Front, and the civil rights movement come to mind—but the making of a free society is first and chiefly an act of imagination, a matter of discovering what new shapes might be made from the materials at hand, and then being foolish enough to place one’s faith in them.

Zephyr Teachout

A few years back, I was a fellow at a think tank in Washington, D.C. The antimonopoly subgroup I was a part of put out a short statement applauding the European Union for taking action to stop Google from giving its own products preference in its search engine. The eight people working in the group were promptly fired or let go. I was a law professor, so losing a fellowship was not a major event for me. But it was for the others, one of whom was pregnant. As The New York Times reported during the rupture, the head of the group alleged that Eric Schmidt of Google—who had also chaired the think tank’s board—influenced the decision. (The company’s representatives denied any such thing.) The message for other nonprofits was clear. 

Later I talked to a friend about making a video about it. “I would,” she said. “But my sister [a freelancer] has some grants with Google, and so….” “It’s fine,” I said, “all fine.”

Was she being cowardly or loyal to her family? It’s hard to say. Power has a way of narrowing down the subjects we are willing to openly discuss. Farmers I talk to say they don’t dare to speak up against distributors, even if there’s no clear proof that punishment will follow: it is enough that it could. As Big Tech and Wall Street gradually put their gloved fist over progressive nonprofits and civic campaigns, political possibilities have narrowed. And then came Musk, who didn’t bother putting his fist in a glove, simply turning over his platform to serve a president’s campaign. 

So many of Trump’s policies are cruel; so many of his operations are corrupt. But for me, what’s most chilling about his rise is that he is willing to take latent power and make it blatant, to gleefully punish those who speak against him. When he said he would put Mark Zuckerberg in jail if he challenged his power, the other tech titans took notice. They are used to groveling with the Chinese government; it didn’t take long for the CEOs of Google, Apple, and Amazon—and Mark Zuckerberg—to call up Trump and flatter him, nor for Jeff Bezos to override The Washington Post’s editorial page and insist that the paper not endorse Harris. 

There are plenty of big, difficult questions to be asked about rebuilding the Democratic Party from the ashes of this election. How are we going to stop the slaughter, block the threatened expulsions of immigrants, protect a shred of climate policy, keep up the tax fights? But in the first few days we would do well to steel our courage and support those who are singled out, even if we despise them. We must, as Martin Luther King Jr. taught in the letter from the Birmingham jail, “self-purify,” not in the sense of thinking highly of ourselves, or refusing to engage with those with whom we disagree, but by practicing the necessary disciplines that will prepare us to speak out when we are tested.

Bill McKibben

I think we’ve finally come to the end of the FDR era. The Depression and World War II were such enormous all-encompassing shocks that they produced a new politics that had to do with solidarity—America as a group project. That was badly frayed by Reaganism, with its every-man-for-himself ethos, but it survived in some form through yesterday. Biden, in fact, was very much a throwback to LBJ, complete with a national manufacturing policy. But that world is over, replaced by one that no one fully understands—a world in which some amalgam of Joe Rogan and TikTok define political attitudes. It’s more of a vacuum.

Which means it will be replaced eventually. My candidate for the exogenous shock on the scale of the Depression and World War II is climate change and the energy transition. I think that the need and the opportunity to convert the world’s economies to cheap renewable power will produce some kind of different politics: more local, and less plutocratic, if we are lucky. But I have my doubts if it will come fast enough to prevent climate disaster on an almost unimaginable scale.

Michael Hofmann

I feel we’ve been circling the drain for months, and now are being rinsed down the plughole. Hello, darkness, my old friend. I’m nauseous and have difficulty breathing. If I looked in the mirror—which I do often these days, purely as a function of disbelief, because I feel I no longer exist—I fancy I would see Ford Madox Ford, a soup-strainer mustache and the appearance of a boiled egg in his mouth, but actually only a gasp because “mustard gassed voiceless some seven miles behind the lines at Nancy or Belleau Wood.” As the poet said. Preserve my words, preserve my words. The wantonness and wickedness of it. I’m sorry for the rest of the world for having something as rancid and pampered and apparently resistless as America in it. Who ever thought male suffrage was a good idea? Come on in, the water’s boiling in this reddened and ever redder and reddening state. Not much meat on these snow crab legs, but you’ll enjoy the crack of your tax cut. Or is it the vertebra of the last surviving trade unionist? It says in our new constitution we’re allowed to hunt and fish. Well, halle-fucking-lujah. And $2 gas a birthright in perpetuity. If only it were some small and out of the way place. Make Armorica Great Again. Make Armorica Great Again. Make Armorica Great Again. But no, this is that shining city, and that last best hope. Gone, all gone. Stick a fork in it. There is only money, bare-faced lies, and evil intentions. The playground inversion of everything. You’re the fascist, you’re the racist, you’re the one threatening me with violence. It’s no consolation, but this country will not know what hit it, and first the low-information electors with their red caps for brains. No overstatement is possible. I feel species disgust. Of course, impetuous. Of course, poet and fine frenzy and all that. Of course, nonsense and hysteria. Oligarchopolis, here we come. Yes, we only live in it. It’s yours, and don’t I know it. How can one not see through something so threadbare, so self-serving, so randomly and contemptuously thrown out by the self-adoring crooner. The oligarchs enter the ark two by two, as once the animals. The T because he faces both ways on every issue. Heads I win, tails you lose. Words without consequences. But they’ll do for a brand. Mine on my forehead, please.

Linda Greenhouse

Donald Trump’s election places a new burden on a Supreme Court already operating under a harsh public spotlight. This is a Court, after all, that in recent months has rejected a constitutional challenge to Trump’s ballot eligibility and granted him a stunning measure of immunity from criminal prosecution. Going forward, the justices—including but not limited to Trump’s three appointees—will have to assure the country that to them he is just another president, entitled no more deference than President Biden, whose student loan forgiveness program and some of whose environmental initiatives the conservative majority invalidated.

True, the Court also met Trump with some skepticism during his first term, blocking his effort to end the DACA program’s shield for young undocumented immigrants and stopping his Commerce secretary from adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census. But these rulings, however important, were essentially procedural, driven by the administration’s failure to follow the ordinary rules of agency practice. The shenanigans inside the Commerce Department that came to light in the census case, for example, would have been laughable had the administration’s vote-suppressing goal not been so alarming.

The amateurish nature of many of the first Trump administration’s encounters with the Supreme Court is highly likely to be replaced by a more disciplined and strategic approach. And it’s worth remembering that, even the last time around, Trump emerged triumphant on the questions that mattered most to him—the Muslim travel ban and the extension of the Mexican border wall into an area that Congress had explicitly disallowed.

Given candidate Trump’s promise to deport millions of people, rid the civil service of “enemies,” and eviscerate entire federal departments, the range of cases likely to reach the Supreme Court in short order is head-spinning. While his ever-changing rhetoric on reproductive issues has left his specific plans obscure, these will undoubtedly include limits on access to medication abortion, including in states where abortion is legal. Even if the Democrats, having lost the Senate, manage to take narrow control of the House, it will be futile to look to Congress for relief. Guardrails, if any, will have to come from the Court. The need will be acute.

Garry Wills

Any one of us who kept mispronouncing a proper name, after repeated coaching on the right way, would be written off as stupid. But Donald Trump kept calling his adversaries Barack HUSSEIN Obama and Ka-MAH-la Harris as a sign to his followers that these creatures, exotically named, were not one of us. They were part of the THEM that WE must keep out. The THEM he had in mind is a large and varied lot, since the WE is such a select body. It has no room for losers, for captives or corpses or the needy­—not even for the bodies of men who died defending their country. Trump’s courtiers allegedly had to spook a battleship out of his sight because it was named for a man he had denounced for having been a captive.

All outsiders are losers. They cannot say “America first” because they are not real Americans. Anyone who needs help is a loser. Women who go out of their place are losers—they should stay to be grannies and take care of the children of other women who stay in their place. Experts and regulators, relying on fancy degrees and studies, who tell us how to live, are losers and the fomenters of losers (out of their “deep state”). The sick, the disabled, and their caretakers are losers, wasting the time and money of the winners. The needy are losers. The winners do not need them. Trump’s dictatorial buddies—Putin and Xi Jinping and Viktor Orbán—do not use power to help the helpless. That is what makes them winners.

Well, Trump’s election shows us who wins. He put the losers in their place. Like women, they must learn to stay in it. Pardon me if I do not celebrate. I, like everyone I know, am a loser, in the past or future or now. I am currently losing to age, and need those expert doctors with their wasteful caretaking. I always needed regulators who kept poison out of my food, and water, and air. The THEM that Trump is extruding includes all who need or care for the needy. That is a lot of us, though at times we do not recognize our right to be in the THEM being condemned. We should not only own that right and build on it, but also see that we share it with all the losers being overlooked by Trump’s dictator pals, like the Palestinians being slaughtered in Gaza with American weapons. We losers have a lot to learn. But we are doing it. Trump is our teacher.